A Simple Sign by the Road

Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux on Hair, Paper, Water...

The film unfolds as a sensorial flow of image, sound and language as we follow miss Cao Thị Hậu, an elderly woman from a rural region in Vietnam, one of the few speakers left of the critically endangered Ruc language. In her old age she dreams of returning to the dark cave where she was born. As she teaches Ruc to her grandson, the words “cave”, “fire”, and “house” figure as initial coordinates, tiny lights in the dark revealing a fragmented portrait of an ever transforming and remade world, of memory and legacy. In the absence of a written form of this disappearing language, the film documents its prosody through intimate observations of daily life in connection to nature. One world does not simply replace another, change is uneven, old and new worlds overlap, exchange lacunae. In this intimate vernacular space, time is relative, broken, articulated through a tension between absence and presence. Words, images and sounds take on each other’s guise. A sense of synaesthesia is kindled as the film plays on the border between language and the audiovisual. Words are sounds, images speak as language and sounds evoke an image of the “fire”, the “river”, the “hair” you remember from your own world. There is a sense of pleasure, of lightness, in Hậu’s transmissions: she seems both intimately entangled with and amusedly detached from the world she is shaping with her words, gestures and gaze. A vantage point held both by the elderly and by children. This pleasure can be sensed – or read – in the way Graux and Truong went about their own transmission. What, then, is a house?

On the occasion of the Belgian release of their film Tóc, Giấy và Nước [Hair, Paper, Water], Sabzian sat down with filmmakers Trương Minh Quý and Nicolas Graux.

Hannes Verhoustraete: I’d like to ask you a little bit about your collaboration. This was the second time you made a film together. You’ve said in earlier interviews that this experience was an important lesson in navigating the pitfalls of working together, not only working together, but also working together as a couple and kind of aligning your voices and your ways of paying attention.

Trương Minh Quý: Who said that? You or me?

Nicolas Graux: You. I think you.

Minh Quý: Such a depressing way of describing…

Graux: Well, Quy and I met in 2020 in Brussels, and since we are both filmmakers with our own filmographies, we started by showing each other our previous films. At that time, we both had just finished a film. I had completed Century of Smoke, which I shot in Laos, and Quy had just finished The Tree House. We realised that we had both been working in some very similar landscapes, territories that are geographically close, but located on different sides of the Vietnam-Laos border. I think we both felt a very strong emotional attachment to that territory. After watching The Tree House, Quy mentioned that miss Hậu had told him half-jokingly that if her valley were to flood during the rainy season, she could take a small boat and go back to the cave where she was born. We thought that this could be the start of a new film. Because it’s a very poetic image first of all, and very cinematic too. But it’s also an image that needs to be constructed with Hậu, with the people around her. This image just stuck in our head and served as a pretext for us to reunite, to return to that place and start a new experience, but this time together.

Kumail Syed: The cave functions as an anchor point in the film. It returns a few times, almost classically, we see or hear it in the beginning, in the middle and in the end, and every time it changes. It serves as a musical theme, one which you could always fall back to, after meandering away.

Graux: It’s nice that you mention music. From the beginning, when we were talking about the project and even before anything was shot, we were saying that it should be like a piece of music, a symphony that evolves, with elements entering at different moments and a kind of recurring theme. So from the start, we had this very musical idea. With the sound too, because even before we decided to use the Bolex camera, we wanted to treat the sound differently, in a more asynchronous way, sounds that would build around gaps or even silence. All of this was part of the cloud of ideas that helped us shape the film in the earliest stages. And regarding the cave, we had a set of keywords floating around, like “cave”, “home”, “water”, “history”, “homelessness”, … I remember we even had a page in our dossier with these words. They created a conceptual space within which we could react to the reality, to the present moment, while also connect ideas. If we saw something in daily life, we could react and associate within this framework of keywords.

Verhoustraete: Was this a kind of game that you conceived? Not in the sense of a light-hearted game, but rather as an attitude of playfulness or a simple device that allowed you to improvise?

Minh Quý: It is a bit hard to go back to the very beginning. The starting point of the film is an image of her going back to her cave on a boat. It’s a very concrete scene: on a boat floating back to the cave. Yet the image itself is very abstract. We didn’t even know if we would be able to capture it. But that starting point, exploring the combination of a concrete image with an abstract idea, ended up resonating throughout the final film somehow. I think the film is a balance of something very playful, real, and tangible (the images, the food, daily life) on the one hand — things we could capture on 16 mm, but that we could also have captured on a digital phone, let’s say. And on the other hand, there’s something a bit more abstract, more conceptual, a certain understanding of what speaks through language. Take the word “home”, for example. The idea of home is stronger than when we are really at home. The core of the film became apparent to us when we realised that it was actually already there: in the language of the Ruc people itself, the transmission and learning of the language.

We always use words for communication, like the word “house”, but what is a house? And when we think about a word without any purpose, it can suddenly become a lot of things. There is the atmosphere to a word that is very close to poetry. Maybe that’s what we tried. I don’t mean to say that we made a “poetic film,” the term has been a bit hijacked, but the idea was to separate the connection between image and language, so the audience could see both the connection and the separation. It’s like using a dictionary: when you search for the meaning of a word in a foreign language, you focus on that one word, ignoring the rest. But if we don’t search for any word in particular and just browse through the dictionary, we see random words, and through that randomness, one word appears without our intention. That’s a very complicated way to talk about the film.

Verhoustraete: No, it’s quite clear because the film starts with this taxonomy. There’s movement in your imagining of the film between language and image. The film opens with this basic vocabulary: “night”, “fire”, “water”, “cave”. These words act like little fireflies, illuminating the world as you’re trying to name it and to make it, because our shared world is somehow built through language. It’s about transmission, about this very vernacular way of being in the world. This simple idea of transmission is very concrete, rooted in daily life, and familiar to us through our own experiences. As viewers and listeners, we are free to observe because very simple formal devices are in place that evacuate certain questions: “Where are we? Where is this film going? What’s the story?” We rarely ask these because we have this device of the taxonomy, this enumeration. Then there’s Hậu’s journey to Saigon [to take care of her new-born greatgrandchild] which is an easily legible geographic movement. And there’s the use of titles. They communicate essential information very clearly, giving structure and at the same time they are an aesthetic graphic element – not merely subtitles. There’s a permeability between the different uses of written word in the image: language as an image.

Minh Quý: It’s like a hopeless attempt to connect and make sense of this world.

Verhoustraete: I don’t think it’s hopeless. I think it’s very simple. You could have built connections in a far more elaborate way.

Graux: This actually goes back to the very origins of the film. We wanted, in a way, to return to the origins of cinema. I mean, it may sound a bit pretentious, but the use of intertitles is something that goes back to early cinema, a rudimentary way to transmit something through images and text.

Syed: At one point, Hậu narrates the myth of how the Ruc language hasn’t survived in a written form. Yet in the film, this language is constantly accompanied by image and sound. Was the absence of a written form itself a way to give form to the film?

Minh Quý: How to show something that doesn’t have a form? The red intertitles are in Vietnamese and of course accompanied by English or French subtitles. But we don’t have her own language in written form, because we don’t know how to write it. So we use another language like Vietnamese to speak about it, to explain how the language cannot exist in written form. It’s a linguistic and philosophical paradox: how do you show nothingness? There are many black moments in the film. For example, when she talks about the origins of the Ruc language and she says there are no traces of their written language, the screen goes black with that intertitle. That blackness is our acknowledgement, as filmmakers, that we cannot show anything there.

Graux: It’s also because we didn’t want to show the cave. From early on, we decided that we wouldn’t show it in an objective way. We wanted the cave to remain something that exists in our imagination, our collective imagination, something that is evoked rather than seen. Also, the cave is darkness. So that’s a very simple way to transcribe the cave. It’s a black image, a missing image.

Verhoustraete: How did this evocation come about in a compositional sense?

Minh Quý: I don’t know. I have a bunch of images, and the question is how to start. I think there’s a certain flow that emerges while editing, and from that flow, we tried to make the film clear without being narratively restricted. We didn’t want the audience to think the film is about the countryside versus the city. For example, at a certain point in the film we don’t know where she is exactly, the space is interchangeable. Or we play with time: the boy is suddenly older, and then we return to when he was still younger. It’s hard to explain... It’s not narrative, but each image will lead to the next. The composition of the film is a combination of a few hundred separated images, each with different qualities, that once combined create a certain energy, a flow. It’s maybe the opposite of an intellectual process. I think it took me just two or three months to finish the editing because there’s no form, no existing standard to judge whether the editing works or not. It’s not like a narrative film, where there are more conventions. In our film, trying to anticipate what a character will do next doesn’t make sense. This film is rather a flow of image and sound. I don’t know, Nicolas, you have to jump in because I’m starting to lose my mind.

Graux: The way this old Bolex camera made us feel is also reflected in the editing. We had to film in very short shots, about 25 to 30 seconds each. In many ways, the editing resembled watching the raw footage. You shoot what’s happening in the moment, then move to another place and shoot again. What you end up with in the raw footage is a flow of that movement between these separate shots. There are many moments in the editing where we kept that rawness of things. One day I filmed a sleeping dog, and then we moved to somewhere else and the next image, I don’t know, is Hậu fetching her cow. This process gradually created a tapestry of images. We discovered during the shooting that the film would be of this nature where time and space don’t really matter in the usual way. It would consist of moments and details associated with each other, allowing a broader sense of abstraction to emerge.

Minh Quý: What I like about this version is that it’s only one possibility to finish the film, one way to show it. If I detach myself as a spectator when I see this film, I think that there are still countless ways to arrange the images, to edit the film. But I like that. As filmmakers we can only offer one version, so this is the version we choose to offer. But it doesn’t mean the possibilities for building the film end with this version.

Syed: Were these 30 seconds of shooting time a limitation or an invitation for you to film? Did they open up possibilities, or were they frustrating and bringing you to want to stage more?

Graux: The process of filming was actually to stage less and less over the course of these two, three years. At first, we came with that image of the boat, the flood and rowing back to the cave, and this needed construction, some staging. We had to arrange it to film it. But then there was something very simple: the desire to film what is actually happening, a spontaneous impulse, driven by not wanting to restrict ourselves. For example, her trip to Saigon was totally unplanned. One day she told us: “I have to go to Saigon to take care of the baby, my granddaughter just gave birth.” This wasn’t part of our plan for the film, but we decided to follow her, and it became a very important part. So, in a way, we staged less and less. When we returned after two years, what we wanted to capture more were just everyday moments: washing laundry, hanging clothes, picking and preparing herbs. These simple, daily gestures gave the film a greater sense of time.

Verhoustraete: When you say that there was no need for an image, you left it black, I never missed an image. It was clear that all I needed was my hearing; sound would do. All the while, I never left this observational mode, my attention tuned to your attention. This continuous insistence of the soundtrack is very effective.

Graux: And sometimes it’s also the opposite. Sometimes an image stands on its own, without the need for sound. It speaks more in its own nature than it would if accompanied by sound. Like when she washes the baby. Normally, we would hear the baby crying. But we don’t, and this gives the image a greater strength. I think it creates a sensation that is enhanced precisely by the lack of sound.

Verhoustraete: It also creates a kind of mnemonic moment. By cutting off the sound, the image becomes linked to memory. Maybe that also brings to mind your choice for the materiality of 16 mm film.

Minh Quý: I think we made this film with the Bolex because we wanted to work with its limitations, specifically the thirty-second duration of each shot. This was something we were very aware of before starting the project. How can we make a film with thirty-second shots? Because it’s short. How do we write something on a piece of paper that’s three times smaller than a regular sheet? That was one of the very first questions.

Graux: Neither of us had used the Bolex camera before. So, it was a new tool. I think it was very relevant for this film that we ourselves were learning to use a new tool or learning to find our way with a new language. Thirty-second shot, reloading the film, unloading the film. All these technicalities can be seen as limitations. But they also bring a great joy of learning, the pleasure of discovering a new language, and to be hands on with the materiality of it. In a way, we were like children with this camera.

Verhoustraete: Yes, there’s this atmosphere of the beginner’s mind. But I sense it throughout the whole film, not only in this analogy between learning to use a new (old) apparatus and documenting Hậu’s teachings. It’s in the whole space of your attention, in language, image and sound. Sometimes it’s very subtle, sometimes it’s absent, and sometimes it’s explosive, making you realise you can’t simply close your ears like you can close your eyes. You have to cover your ears to cut off the sound. There’s indeed this embodied playfulness of children.

Graux: We’re children in our position towards her as well. I think that’s a very beautiful thing, because she’s the one who knows. She knows how this works, how that works. And with her, we’re in a very humble position of learning. It’s even reflected in the way we film her. I realised that during the shooting more and more I was crouching down on the ground to be a bit lower than her. It was not intentional but just a spontaneous posture I assumed toward her. So, we’re like children observing our grandmother, learning from her actions and teachings. I think that reflects the experience of the people watching the film as well.

Syed: In films that depict social realities, whether in a neighbourhood in Belgium or in Vietnam, there’s often this question of how to deal with all these different forms, with the clichés we carry, and with the authority of ideas and images that constantly asserts itself. How do you open your relationship with these conceptions that you’ve built and translate them into an image?

Minh Quý: I think I understand how you feel. We sense this different approach to reality because we see an image after a word. For example, we hear the word “night”, and of course, everyone immediately has their own ideas of night. That’s the image of a word. Then we see a night which is not what we imagined. It’s very concrete, very present. It’s not in our heads. So sometimes we read a word before seeing an image, as in the film. But if we see a fire before reading the word “fire”, the image we associate with the word is now the one we just saw in the film. It’s not the image of the fire in Liège or from your childhood in Belgium.

Graux: I think a key aspect is that we wanted to approach the film like a home movie. When you watch an old family movie, even of someone else, you watch something given to you without context. Most family filming happens without contextualisation. If you put yourself in that position, for instance, a father filming his children, he won’t bother with context. He will just film very close, with that pre-existent love, tenderness or fascination. We wanted to approach this reality that we were in in the same way. In a sense, it’s a very raw impression of this reality that maybe enabled us to project something of our own, of our own memories or families, because it’s free of this contextualization.

Minh Quý: When you watch a film, you’re trying to make sense of the world, to make sense of what you’re seeing. And I think that we can feel the effort of someone, like the effort of a translator. Maybe very clumsily at times, because the original language is too complicated. But nevertheless, there is this human effort to connect and to make sense. I think that’s what the audience senses as well, there’s something that allows them to watch this film without feeling uninvited.

Syed: We come to see that the private is also political, that the small, everyday gestures she performs carry a lot of meaning. With that comes a responsibility, both as a maker and as a spectator, because you suddenly realise that these actions are political and there’s this urge to preserve them. It makes me question the idea of responsibility among makers. How do you navigate these questions, perhaps not only in this film, but in general as makers?

Minh Quý: I think this film has a very particular nature. Because Hậu comes from a rural community. I’m Vietnamese but I’m not from a rural area. So even for me, going to her village to film already puts me in this position of an outsider. What does daily life look like for them? The struggles for money and food, how she has to sell her hair to make some money. It’s normal for them, not only for her. But of course, I think that as an outsider, as we capture this on film, and connecting it to other images, the economic context of her life emerges through the ways she navigates it, intertwined with our intentions as makers. There’s a clear awareness that she had to struggle alone, with no government support. We didn’t want to fabricate a political point that’s not visibly there, but here it’s political. When we show the old market that looks destroyed where she buys food, her long hair that she had to have cut to make money, and the stupid propaganda billboard by the road saying “Overcoming poverty is your own responsibility”, it’s our deliberate choice to show that something’s not right here. We decided to show it because it’s incorporated into her life, within the image, within the flow of what is there to film. We didn’t set up any of it to make a statement. I think it’s another way to make something political. We don’t want to shy away from expressing a political point of view either, but here it’s embedded in the flow of what’s there to film. At the same time, this is still an analytical point of view from outsiders like Nicolas and me, from urban Vietnam and Belgium able to see the different structures of economy and societies, and understand that being poor is not the person’s fault. Hậu herself never questions these circumstances or blames the authorities. The people won’t blame them for not helping nor for this billboard, which is just there by the road and everyone, including her, would read it every day and wouldn’t see the problem with that message. Of course, we saw the problem. Showing the billboard particularly is the moment we feel unhappy with what’s going on there and criticize it.

Graux: But she sees the problem within relationships. For example, when the little boy speaks about his father hitting him, she sees the problem, of course, and wants to help. And we focus on that care.

Verhoustraete: Because you don't want to impose a superstructure that determines “these are the problems here”, and then trace their symptoms in her life. It’s the other way round, it emerges from what’s there to be observed.

Minh Quý: Knowing that she didn’t see any problem in that message, we could have decided not to show the billboard. For her, it’s just like any other propaganda billboard, of which there are many in Vietnam. We show it because here, as filmmakers, we could express something from our point of view without necessarily agreeing with the protagonist.

Graux: But we find a way to show it without imposing our own meaning. We show it right after an image with another road sign. The billboard comes after this road sign “Border area”. It’s like any other simple road sign, just there by the side of the road among others. That’s how we present it, allowing it to be seen without forcing a judgment onto the viewer.